On Saturday night, Don Fiorino, Mark Flynn, Chris Jones, and <i>Stereophile</i>’s Bob Reina came together, within the walls of Merkin Concert Hall, as Attention Screen. I sat in the audience, watching and listening as these four men exchanged ideas, made music. I'm not going to say it was beautiful. I'm not going to say it was interesting.
John Atkinson sent me a link to <I>Time</I>'s Rick Rubin interview. I can see why JA liked it—Rubin's production philosophy reminds me a lot of the way JA edits and records.
Here's something you probably never even knew existed: music librarian humor.
Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran ponders self-awareness.
<I>Allen's English Phrases</I> sounds like a fun read.
Faithfully reproducing the sound of real, live musicians in our listening rooms is the audiophile's Holy Grail. Have you ever heard a system do this? If so, what was it?
On Saturday, February 10, collaborative improvisation band Attention Screen gave its debut at Manhattan's Merkin Hall at Kaufmann Center to a packed house. The event was recorded by John Atkinson for release in May as a <I>Stereophile</I> CD, possibly followed by a limited-edition DVD-A.
Is a high-end music server the audio equivalent of polishing a turd?
Naim's new "statement" CD player, the CD555 ($20,300 by itself, $28,150 with PS555 power supply), breaks no new technological ground. Rather, in typical Naim fashion, it attempts to optimize 16-bit/44.1kHz CD performance by paying fanatical attention to the devilish details. It doesn't play the DVD-Video, DVD-Audio, or SACD formats, nor does it have a digital output—and it doesn't create an illusion of higher resolution by upsampling the data.
Finding myself in the Northwest on business, I reckoned I'd grab some Seattle dim sum with my nephew before heading my rental car south on I-5 to visit old friends in Oregon. "You live here," I said to Sean. "What are the good radio stations?"